The quality of a network connection can drastically affect the quality of the activities that are carried out over that network connection. Activities that are especially sensitive to connection quality include gaming and voice communication over IP, or VoIP for short. Online gaming is an extremely common form of recreation in the modern world and can often be very competitive. Competitive gaming is even performed in a professional setting where players vie for position and monetary prizes. In all forms of online gaming, be it recreational or competitive, a good network connection is crucial to the performance of the players. Poor network connection quality can result in performance problems known as lag and rubber banding. In lag, the actions taken by the player are not processed for a noticeable time delay, hence the term lag. Lag is most often caused by high latency between the player's machine and the game server. In rubber banding, the actions that are perceived as taking place by the user do not actually register with the game sever. This can result in the player ending up in a position in the game world they were in several moments ago and had since progressed. This effect can be perceived by players as what appears to be teleportation from point to point as if the player is being pulled around by a rubber band, hence the terminology used to describe this effect. As expected, issues such as lag and rubber banding can have a drastic impact on player performance which can ultimately result in losing the game and much less enjoyment gained from playing the game. VoIP is another activity occurring over network connections that can be greatly affected by a poor network connection. VoIP is a form of communication which allows for communication by voice over the internet. When using VoIP, latency issues can make it difficult for participants in a conversation to communicate effectively, causing unnecessary delays that can result in participants unintentionally talking over each other. Additionally, packet loss can result in poor communication quality which can make it difficult for participants to understand each other. These issues can make it very difficult to communicate using VoIP.
It comes as no surprise that many gamers playing online games also use VoIP to communicate with other players to form and carry out complex strategies and plans. When a poor network connection is being used, both the actions of the gamer in the game and the communication with other players can be completely scrambled. When this happens, the gaming experience suffers and the game becomes barely worth playing as little enjoyment is gained. There are ways to fix and or bypass poor network connections to ensure that the connection problems as described earlier are not suffered by the gamer, however common knowledge dictates this fact; if the problem cannot be identified, then it cannot be solved.
Many games and VoIP programs incorporate a built in latency or ping meters that displays the latency value of the network connection to the user. These ping meters can assist a user in determining when a problem is being caused by the network connection. Unfortunately, as effective as such meters are at displaying latency, they suffer from several major flaws. The first and foremost of those flaws is the fact that almost all ping meters incorporated into games and other applications only display the instantaneous value for the latency of the connection. What this means is that, at any given moment, the latency displayed by the ping meter is the latency experienced by the last packet of data sent by the game to the game server. Because of this, the latency as displayed by the ping meter fluctuates over time, and so the reading on the ping meter at any given time is not an accurate representation of the quality of the network connection being used for that activity. The second problem of such ping meters is the simple fact that they only keep track of one particular metric; latency. Unfortunately, the quality of the network connection can be influenced by metrics other than an instantaneous latency score such as the latency deviation, the number of hops between sender and destination, and packet loss experience. Such metrics can be very telling about the overall quality of a network connection and they are not displayed by ping meters.
It is an object of the present invention to create a network connection quality meter that solves the issues discussed above. The present invention solves the issues discussed above by tracking latency of a network connection over time as well as other performance metrics such as number of hops and packet loss. Additionally, it is an object of the present invention to use a system that enables comparison between the network connection currently being utilized and a benchmark connection. Through this set up, a user is able to see how poor their network connection is when compared to a benchmark connection. Implementing the present invention may help a user identify network connection problems and determine how to correct or bypass those problems, ultimately improving the experience of performing online activities such as gaming and VoIP over network connections.